Megan Ingram
October 29, 2021
There are different types of remote teams from 100% remote, to hybrid remote, to remote work while at a live event. These remote teams can be within a small business, agency, solo-freelancer, or a large marketing team working under an enterprise brand. No matter what type of remote work environment - tools for remote teams are critical to boost workplace productivity, create team collaboration, and build a work culture that thrives. I’m a tool geek, always looking for the latest technology, understanding new capabilities, and trying to find new ways to make remote work *work* for everyone. In this month’s Coffee Sesh With Megan blog, I’ve gathered a list of my tool favorites for you to think about and browse while sipping a cup of coffee. Don’t forget to hit the comments with your favorites when you’re finished reading.
Are you always looking for the latest technology, understanding new capabilities, and trying to find new ways to make remote work work for everyone?
Working collaboratively in a remote team environment is key and while I’m partial to collaboration tools like Slack and Zoom - the most important thing is that your team engages and uses the tool regularly. Find a tool that works best for your team to communicate regularly with ease. Here are my collaboration go-to’s that make life for our team simpler:
Slack: If you don’t know what Slack is you’ve been living in a hole, apparently. There are a ton of these types of products on the market but Slack is my favorite with private and public channels for projects, easy integrations with other productivity tools, quick file sharing for deliverables, and of course DM’s. It’s the work collaboration king.
Zoom (no Microsoft Teams please): No introduction needed but it’s made video conferencing painless with links to share in calendar invites, recording options, and other really great video features. We even record our podcasts with it!
Google Suite products (sorry Microsoft, again): I’m not going to completely slam all Microsoft products here, but the Google suite rules (sorry not sorry). Whether it's real-time collaborative decks or the easy to access Google Drive. It has saved our work organization life.
MURAL: If you don’t know about this whiteboard collaboration tool go check it out now. Their online whiteboards are great for so many team needs: project management, weekly scrums, new business brainstorming to name a few. Their templates can be molded to fit pretty much any business need.
Dropbox: Sometimes you have a huge file and Gdrive isn’t an option. For file sharing, Dropbox is my trusted go-to. For creative teams one gripe with Gdrive is file size - video, podcasts, original photography... These things require large files. Dropbox works great for getting large files across a distributed team no matter what time zone you are in.
We only have so many hours in the day and we have many priorities especially if you are a senior business leader. Don’t waste time on things that can be delegated, automated, or with a tool that can cut down on the time it takes to get things done. Our time is meaningful; treat it as such.
Clockify: Time management is a struggle for many freelancers and agency folks. This chrome extension makes it very easy to clock-in for different projects and track your time. Bonus: they’ve got downloadable reports you can attach to any invoice.
Asana: There are many project management tools on the market (Trello, Teamwork, and Monday.com are some popular ones). But the variety of templates and reporting functions, and the effortless way you can create to-do’s and assign roles makes this tool stand out to me.
Calendly: For senior management people, this is a great way to get more time out of your day. Cutting down on administrative time allows you to focus on the higher priority tasks. Calendly allows you to create a public link that syncs with your calendar and book meetings that work with your schedule - no assistant needed.
Superhuman: I generally love pretty much any Google product, but recently my Gmail has gotten out of control. Too many messages coming in? Not sure which emails matter? How can you better filter emails? Superhuman literally has saved my email life and is definitely worth a test if email organization is a struggle.
Whether you are part of an in-house content marketing team, an agency team, or run your own freelance business, many of us are responsible for managing content development and posting regularly on social media while working with a remote team. This list could have gone on for pages but I’m just dropping five tools the Ingram Digital Consulting Team couldn’t live without when creating and distributing content remotely.
Airtable: I came across this cloud collaboration database tool two years ago and it completely changed our content marketing workflow. While we use this to help manage various content development work streams, the template library is literally endless with ways you can create, store, and manage data.
Agorapulse: Many people are partial to Hootsuite to schedule and post social media, but the advanced capabilities of Agorapulse are worth a consideration. With advanced reporting, saving hashtag topics, and topic/audience categorization, Agorapulse informs and collects data to allow your team to build more meaningful content insights within a small budget.
Later: Does your remote team post Instagram UGC content regularly? If so, this tool is worth examining. You can view UGC posts around a hashtag, topic, or author, and directly post from your account within the tool.
Adobe: Without infuriating too many designers, I’ve found overall the Adobe Creative suite to be my personal preference. While I understand why the simplicity and ease of Canva for non-designer folks to create and edit images has gained popularity, the advanced features of Adobe truly make a world of difference in creative design.
Social Rank: I didn’t want to dive too deep into the world of social media listening and influencer marketing in this blog but I wanted to throw in a callout to Social Rank. They build lists around Twitter and Instagram profiles for you to pull for identification and vetting around authors. This is a great hack for any social media whitelisting needs.
Tools are great ways to cut down on time intensive activities and can remove remote team communication barriers but don’t forget to leverage marketing automation into your business workflows (even when working remotely). App integration, rules, and real time connectors are three top ways to quickly integrate more automation into your remote organization.
Zapier: This tool is the master of workflow process automation with so many applications in their never ending database. End users can integrate a tool based upon rules/actions so they don’t have to do it themselves. For example, export contacts from a form into a Google sheet once they submit. Result: no more manual landing page form data entry dumps.
Supermetrics: This is a more advanced marketing automation tool that is great for any real time dashboard or a simpler ETL solution. If you use Google Data Studio, you can use Supermetrics to create a real time connector with social media platforms to gain real-time data insights. They have many applications but for any reporting dashboard needs it cuts your manual data entry time down significantly. Highly recommend it.
Use rules: No matter what tool solutions you use, rules can cut down on those annoying manual tasks you’d like to eliminate. Use them.
I have many honorable mentions to this list, not to mention specialty classes of tools like social media listening, podcast marketing, website development, competitive analysis, and data visualization tools that I wish I could’ve included. For a longer list of tools I’ve tried, used, and recommend, scroll this Twitter list.
October 29, 2021
